POST TIME: Remembering Riviera Beach's Trylon tower and 'bazaar'

Eliot Kleinberg @eliotkpbp

Monday

Nov 5, 2018 at 2:50 PMNov 5, 2018 at 2:50 PM

Readers: Julie Criswell of North Palm Beach recalls visiting, at the tender age of 3, a tower and shopping complex near the Port of Palm Beach. She recalled baby alligators swam in water channels in and around the place, and how, one night. “I somehow managed to fall into the water with the baby alligators.”Julie was describing the Bazaar International in Riviera Beach. Here’s more, most of it from a 2004 column:The collection of 50 shops and restaurants was dubbed “the world’s most unusual market place” when it opened in 1960 on Broadway (U.S. 1).Its highlight was the 230-foot Trylon Tower. Built in “Tomorrowland” style, it was intended to point the way to a thriving future for the area. Instead, it became a symbol of what could have been. The commercial strip fell into disrepair, as did most of Palm Beach County’s coastal areas in the 1970s and 1980s.The three-sided tower, its concrete skin done in a latticework, was topped by a pagoda-style observation deck, which was dubbed “Florida’s Tallest Tourist Attraction” — not a hard feat in a state whose highest point is 345 feet above sea level. Visitors could drop a half-dollar coin into a turnstile and walk to the top, where, owners bragged, on a clear day, you could see to the Bahamas (Grand Bahama, the closest island, is 52 miles away).But by the end of the 1960s, the Bazaar and many other businesses along Broadway had been eclipsed by the Palm Beach Mall. The Bazaar began leasing space to government agencies and a veterans’ outpatient clinic. The tower, closed to tourists in the 1970s, began to decay. The port bought the site in 1993 from the Resolution Trust Corp., which was created to handle failed savings and loans.The port made plans to raze the property to make way for its $25 million Skypass elevated roadway project. A consultant told the state Department of Transportation that, while the complex was less than 50 years old, it was potentially eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, because it had features reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. But the state Division of Historical Resources called the tower “interesting” but not historic. The tower was leveled in 1998.The man behind the tower was Joseph Mass. Owner of a national ceramic floor tile operation, he and Louis Perini, both from the Boston area, are credited for West Palm Beach’s 1950s residential westward expansion.Mass patterned his new mall on marketplaces he’d seen in Turkey, Naples and Paris. His place featured “a dramatic design of cement and steel with a gabled and turreted exterior, hexagonal stained glass windows and a tiled reflecting pool,” Palm Beach Post home editor Ava Van DeWater wrote in 1992.Mass died in April 1985.